The United Arab Emirates will launch its first lunar rover in November as part of its ambitious goal of building a human colony on Mars by 2117.
The Rashid rover, named for Dubai’s ruling family, would be launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida sometime between November 9 and November 15. The exact date will be announced next month, he said.
The rover is to be launched aboard a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket and deposited on the moon by a Japanese ispace lander sometime in March. The 10-kilogram Rashid rover is one of many government and commercial payloads that the lander is carrying, with a landing attempt on the Moon expected end of April 2023.
The Rashid rover will spend one lunar day, or 14 Earth days, exploring the area, capturing science data and images. It will study the properties of lunar soil, the petrography and geology of the Moon, dust movement, and study surface plasma conditions and the Moon's photoelectron sheath.
This is the UAE's first Moon mission, with more rovers to be developed in the future. It has been named in honour of the late Sheikh Rashid Al Saeed, the former Ruler of Dubai and the father of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai.
The Rashid rover has been built by engineers from the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre. A core team of 11 are behind the space mission’s development and have been working on it since 2017.
Already, an Emirati satellite is orbiting Mars to study the red planet’s atmosphere. The UAE partnered with Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to launch that probe, which swung into Mars’ orbit in February 2021.
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